Sol Wind

The Sol Wind is the personal vehicle of Sam Blackjack, private I. If you look closesly at the paint, you can see the original name coming through the top coat, which reads “Soul Window,” but upon purchase, Sam (or “Twenty-one,” as his friends sometimes call him) promptly renamed it. Commenting that “Soul Window” was a stupid name and he didn’t know why in tarnation anyone would name a ship that, he has never thought twice about it.

At any rate, the Sol Wind is equipped with a gravitic repulsor drive (an unusual propulsion mode for a ship of its size) and an ion engine for interstellar flight. It’s not the fastest thing in the galaxy, but Sam would tell you his quickdraw makes up for that.

A bit of an eccentric, Sam prefers to use projectile weapons over the more modern energy weapons. His choice: an antique Colt revolver kept in pristine condition, with the chambers loaded. In his words, “I Ain’t never needed more’n 6 anyway!” And to his credit, he hasn’t.

The ship has two storage compartments for his hat, magnifying glass, and other tools. The gun stays in the ship.

Design Notes:

As with all my rendered models, this one is buildable in real life in the colors shown (unless I’ve missed something). The pseudo-spherical lid was rather difficult to come up with. Other than that, the design wasn’t too bad. Trying to fit a minifig into something so small, yet still keep it sturdy and functional was also rather difficult.

Finally, if you look at the dat file, you’ll see that the scanner doesn’t appear to be attatched to anything. It should swing up and down via the modern LOM martian arms (also used on SW droids). I couldn’t find them in Ldraw dat form and I was too anxious to be done with the model, so you’ll just have to imagine them there.